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This may sound like a strange question, but it's incredibly relevant to my company. If it's legit to purchase previously used VL keys for SQL Server 2008 and have them legally transferred over to us through VLSC, that would fill a huge gap for us.

We have an application that runs on SQL Server 2008 (not R2). If you read the licensing guidelines for SQL 2008, you can deploy as many virtual machines PER SOCKET as you want, as long as you've licensed all sockets.

We run a SaaS application that is backed by SQL Server. As you can imagine, the licensing change to core-based licensing is quite literally a "million dollar" decision for us as we continue to roll out new Production hypervisors and SQL virtual servers.

Thus far, we've been able to find retail copies of SQL 2008 as we build out new servers, but I assume as some point the retail supply of 2008 Ent Per-Proc licenses will be exhausted. However, since Microsoft no longer offers upgrade "discounts" for SQL Server, If you bought a perpetual VLK license of 2008 (without software assurance), you have to pay full price for 2012 if you want to upgrade.

This would mean that there is a large population of SQL 2008 volume licenses that are basically used, right? If so, does anyone know if Microsoft has a provision to transfer ownership of these volume licenses to a different company?

Lastly, if all of the above is accurate, does anyone have unused SQL 2008 Enterprise Per-Proc VL keys they would like to sell?

user207411
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1 Answers1

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1) Licensing questions will generally be closed as a duplicate of: Can you help me with my software licensing issue?

The general answer is - go speak with your licensing rep.

2) I can almost guarantee that if you speak with said licensing rep, they will tell you "No"

3) Why in the world would you buy retail copies and not look at the service provider licensing models from Microsoft?

4) Go find a Microsoft VAR who can talk you through all the various licensing options that might work better for you than retail copies.

5) Seriously.. go talk to a VAR

Community
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Rex
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  • **Why buy retail over SPLA?** Short answer, SLPA isn't nearly as cheap as Microsoft like you to think if you have clients that stick around for more than a year. Here's a simple example: SPLA SQL 2012 Standard (for a 24-core system) - $1,440/mo $17,280/yr Retail SQL 2012 Standard (Same system) - $43,200 one-time payment For the first two years, SPLA's seems like a great deal, but then after two years you're paying considerably more. So if you have the cash for retail or volume licensing and plan on having paying clients for more than two years, you may as well go retail or VL. – user207411 Jan 31 '14 at 22:43
  • So bottom line, SPLA isn't that great of a deal if you don't need to turn up and turn down licensing on a regular basis. On average, our clients sign 2-3 year deals, and software vendors are much more likely to give you pricing discounts when you fork over large single payments. From my experience, SPLA pricing is pretty rigid, and there are only a small handful of approved vendors (plus a ton of paperwork). So being that we can get per-socket licensing with SQL 2008 Retail, it's a FRACTION of the cost of SQL 2012 per-core retail or SQL 2012 SPLA. – user207411 Jan 31 '14 at 22:44